I said to my husband last night after watching Scarborough that those 14 Syrians are barely functioning idiots if they were truly innocent & oblivious to how their behavior looked to the rest of the folks on that aircraft. I know there's a machismo factor in the Middle East, but don't you think law-abiding MEs would try to keep a low profile?
One of the things James Woods said on O'Reilly about his observations of the dry run before 9/11 was that the men looked like they were working together...like they were following the same script...something like that. I think the fact that several of the Syrians on Annie Jacobsen's flight standing up when the pilot announced that they would be landing soon sounds like a group of people working together...not a coincidence.
Very well stated. Thank you and dito!
I agree with you. Whether laying around or casing the aircraft, those Middle Easterners were up to something.
- Actor James Woods was on an airplane trip a week before the terrorist attack and reported four middle eastern men acting strangely. The actor waited until the plane landed to report the incident, but the authorities did nothing about it. -Source Iwon.com / The National Enquirer Online
Several weeks before the attacks, the actor James Woods was in the first-class section of a cross-country flight to Los Angeles. Four of his fellow-passengers were well-dressed men who appeared to be Middle Eastern and were obviously travelling together. "I watch people like a moviemaker," Woods told me. "As in that scene in 'Annie Hall' "—where Woody Allen and Diane Keaton are sitting on a bench in Central Park speculating on the personal lives of passers-by. "I thought these guys were either terrorists or F.B.I. guys," Woods went on. "The guys were in synch—dressed alike. They didn't have a drink and were not talking to the stewardess. None of them had a carry-on or a newspaper. Nothing.
"Imagine you're at a live-music event at a small night club and you're standing behind the singer. Everybody is clapping, going along, enjoying the show— and there's four guys paying no attention. What are they doing here?" Woods concluded that the men were "casing" the plane. He said that his concern led him to hang on to his cutlery after lunch. He shared his worries with a flight attendant. "I said, 'I think this plane is going to be hijacked.' I told her, 'I know how serious it is to say this,' and asked to speak to the captain." The flight attendant, too, was concerned. The plane's first officer came over immediately and assured Woods that he and the captain would keep the door to the cockpit locked. The remainder of the trip was bumpy but uneventful, and Woods recalled laughingly telling his agent, who asked about the flight, "Aside from the terrorists and the turbulence, it was fine."
Woods said that the flight attendant told him that she would file a report about the suspicious passengers. If she did, her report probably ended up in a regional Federal Aviation Authority office in Tulsa, or perhaps Dallas, according to Clark Onstad, the former chief counsel of the F.A.A., and disappeared in the bureaucracy. "If you ever walked into one of these offices, you'd see that they have no secretaries," Onstad told me. "These guys are buried under a mountain of paper, and the odds of this"—a report about suspicious passengers—"coming up to a higher level are very low." Even today, eight months after the hijacking, Onstad said, the question "Where would you effectively report something like this so that it would get attention?" has no practical answer.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?020603fa_FACT